Architecture Design

The DVD is fine. But I would like to know why Amazon out restrictions to send other products to Brasil.
Rating: 5 / 5

This movie is a nice addition to any architects video library as there are so few architect videos available and provides some insight into the creative process. For the layman there is a glossy ‘The Fountainhead’ story which just reinforces the prejudices against architects as lone creative genius’s forging ahead against the tide (and the client’s most pressing needs) instead of highly skilled problem solvers who develop unique approaches along the way.

The format for this documentary is the infomercial. Just like those you see on Sunday mornings advertising vacuum cleaners or muscle machines, this one advertises an architect. So you get little clips showing the inventor of the product, in this case, Frank Gehry, giving their canned answers to questions from the director, in this case Sydney Pollack. Then you cut to a famous person endorsing the product (the architecture of Frank Gehry) and then back to the architect, etc.

Frank Gehry is a very famous architect who has put in the time and effort to attain that goal. This means focusing on those steps necessary to achieve fame and fortune. The movie allows us to see some of these steps such as changing your name (like Le Corbusier), setting up a financial situation from which to focus on creativity, copying the recent trends and finding your own branding approach.

Most famous architects these days get a university position which provides health insurance and a salary and then focus on creating a brand approach for themselves and entering competitions using the free labor of their students (Many continue to pick the fruit of free student labor after winning). Other famous architects such as the late James Stirling, land a bunch of large scale developer work and then use that established firm to go after more glamorous work.

Mr. Gehry went the latter route and the movie shows us a shot of a bland large mall project he did and then provides us with his pivitol moment where he chucks his large 50 person firm and goes down to a few people and begins to only do very “creative” work (The pivitol moment in the movie is not the real pivitol movment as I shall discuss later). The movie does not also explain how the fee he would have recieved from that very large 10 million dollar or so project ($1 million?) would have made chucking his staff and doing only creative work very easy and not ,”jumping off a cliff”, as he says in the movie.

As for his history, the movie does mention his dumping his first wife (but not that he had 2 daughters) but not as part of his frustration with his lack of fame. In the movie he says his first wife was a control freak but is that the opinion of her friends? He has 2 sons by his second very successful marriage. There is limited discussion of his childhood (In one paper about him on the internet it says he got beat up at school when a teen after moving from Toronto to another school outside the city by jerks because he was different. This must of made him sad and angry. Did these emotions help to create works which are simultaneously angry and sentimental?) How did his father influence him? His mother? (Frank Lloyd Wright’s mother used to stroke his hair and say over and over how he was going to grow up to be a great architect). We know his grandmother made cities of blocks with him which is probably the most important key to his entire methodology yet little is explored here. To understand an artist, contrary to most textbooks, it is necessary to see the whole person and the connections to the primal motivations behind the work (Duchamp and his sister to understand the Large Glass).

Next, the movie makes no mention of the real pivitol moment in his career which is mentioned in many of the books about him, by him, which is this: As the owner of a large commercial firm in Los Angeles doing lots of mall work, he was asked if his office could be used by the local architects professional chapter for a reception for a famous “paper” architect (lots of drawings and articles but little real building), Peter Eisenman. At this reception he himself was not even invited and dissed as a “commercial” architect (no creativity, just getting jobs and getting them built- like lots of bland malls). This really infuriated Mr. Gehry and the rest of his life has been an attempt to get back at those folks which he has done. And what better way to get back at those academic jerks than to embrace dada.

After changing your name and getting financially secure if only temporarily, the next step to achieving fame is branding yourself (or “establishing a style” or “finding your voice”). Mr. Gehry, with the help of an artist client (with whom he worked designing together on the artist’s house) went with the relaxed, west coast, no tie working class theme. It worked wonderfully and any decent biography would show, as I saw in the 80’s, the picture of a group of famous architects gathered together all wearing white collared shirts and ties and showing nice models and renderings except Gehry who purposely wore a blue oxford shirt (for “blue collar”- get it?) and showed only construction drawings. He actually said he was more of a, “street fighter”, architect (his father had actually done some streetfighting). This branding was very thorough and he would talk about being a truck driver (anyone who has driven a truck for work knows it’s like driving a car) as if he had considered that as a career path (he worked for two years probably so he would qualify for free in-state college tuition just as my brother had to do). Any half way decent documentary would have carefully described this schtick and it’s success at enabling him to move up a few notches on the fame ladder.

One important part of Gehry’s development was his year in France. Why France? When He says in designing his own house back in the 70’s that the house had the, “ghosts of cubism”, which may sound sophmoric but I think this point is critical. How can anyone who is young and goes to France not be saturated with the history of modern art- especially the cubist period? To one who is searching for a starting point to go from bland deveoper architect to “high brow” architect quickly, this is where Gehry may have started.

The movie does a great service to the creative community however, in talking with Mr. Gehry’s therapist and these are the funniest moments and the most natural. The therapist reveals, without saying precisely, that he enabled the architect to discover his essential contribution to architecture by answering this question, one every architect asks themselves: “Why can’t the building end up as exciting as the conceptual sketches I started designing with?”. Mr. Gehry’s therapist undoubtedly answered with, “Why not?”. And thus, after obtaining a gift no othe architect is likely to ever receive (see next paragraph), Mr. Gehry now can hand a sketch to his workers and say, “Make the building like this.”, and they can.

The gift he received is nicely shown in the video which is a client hiring Mr. Gehry to design a house, never built, over and over again just doing as much research and employing as many people as he liked, sending a monthly bill which the client paid. This is what Gehry calls the equivalent of his “genius grant”, and the amount of money he got from that client was 6 million dollars (yeah, I know, all us architects are jealous of that for sure). This research enabled him to buy the computers and genius personell to create an office system which can make any scribble shaped building no matter how many curves and also tell him how much it will cost which lets him make changes to meet clients budgets.

The film also does a great job of showing the layman how the style of architecture called, “expressionism”, is created. This style has been used by many great architects such as the Barcelona 19th century genius Gaudi (the first one to make wavy gravy buildings and he did it without help or computers over a hundred years ago) and the Germans Mendelsson and Scharoun, then the most famous, the Finn, Aalto, with Gehry, the Iranian genius Zaha Hadid, and the Barcelonan, Miralles the latest. Essentially you take a clients program and make a sketch of functional layout and then play with it until you are satisfied, focusing on getting things “just right” and not forcing any geometry or preconceived form. While the film would have you believe Mr. Gehry was the first expressionist since Aalto, he is just another brilliant architect working with this expressionist method. The result is a building which is, “picturesque”, in that there are many forms mushed together asymmetrically. this is a medeival composition strategy, also used by the late nineteen century architect H.H. Richardson and others especially in the turn of the century, “shingle style”. Whether an architect does an asymmetrical shingle style building or an asymmetrical expressionist, it’s the same thing with different clothes talent wise. this is never discussed.

In fact, the Gehry compositional goal is more one allied with the dadaist work of Kurt Schwitters and his “Mersbau” sculpture of 1920 which made a room with sculptural shapes in an irrational modus operandi as an antidote to the overly rational art and political world around him. This embracing the “irrational” or “emotional” over “rational” is a reaction against the rationalism of the post modern classical architecture which was fashionable at the flowering point of Gehry’s career. As theoretical rationalist architects like Eisenmann’s attempt at buildings turned in to comical disasters (I personally love models of the House X and was a huge fan and then he never put in the hard work of combining function, form and details to make human spaces- the only thing that is successful is the stadium with it’s functional pieces and a pleasing form), Gehry’s buildings brought irrationalism back as a “third way” between always new geometric white stale mechancial rational modernism and the recycled classicism of post modernism. The one who really brought back expressionism and created a whole new way of composing forms was Zaha Hadid with her, “arrested movement”, style (combining Malevich with Mendelsohn’s dune sketches). One of Gehry’s great strengths, mentioned in the movie, is his understanding the actual built thing is different from a nice model or conceptual sketch and he invested that 6 million dollar gift wisely so that his product really matches the hype.

And while the scribble building is an idea invented by the dadaist architects Coop Himmelbau when they began to try a sort of automatic sketching and actually executed one in their rooftop addition in Vienna, Gehry has taken this idea and put cosy, soft pseudo futurist arms around it. As you can see in the movie, Gehry has a sentimental side that really does want to provide a traditional cartoon for each client. And when he says in the movie that he looks into the waste basket and sees lots of great forms an opportunity to discuss Mack Scogin’s work was missed. Scogin, while searching for an idea for a pavillion for the Atlanta Olympic games crumpled up a piece of paper and tossed it on the site model which caused his design mates to exclame, ‘Perfect!’. Thus dada was zeitgeist. Gehry’s new museum in Paris essentially takes Scogin’s Atlanta pavilion project and makes the top glass curvy, thus copying and changing, not suddenly springing forth from his mind like an immaculate conception.

None of this is delved into really in the movie. Gehry compositionally and methodogically is the last of the post modernists where playing with blocks the norm as in the old classicists. And this is part of the allure of his works as they contain the childish look of your old 19th century main street come to life as a cartoon. Anyone who has seen one of his recent buildings will tell you it is as if all the other buildings around his are dead and his is dancing. Much of the credit for this is the influence of the great architect Zaha Hadid who has caused all the architects trying to become famous to incorporate her work- especially adding movement. Even Eisenman has sucummed to doing his best to imitate her in order to stay famous. The movie does show many of his buildings in quick clips but there are much better oportunities for extended moving shots which a director with more time and effort could have created.

Essentially, like Dada, Gehry makes a sketch and then when building models, if anything looks, “proper”, in any traditional architectural sense (AFTER making great urban gestures and making sure all spaces function properly), he, “wrecks”, them until the properness is gone. But he wrecks them beautifully!

His work is the result of millions of hours of tedious office work and the movie shows him working in his office but again, a real biography would show us a nice time line to let the 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration element come to light. Unlike the apparently shallow Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry actually worked his way up and knows what boring building codes say and how bathrooms and elevators and stairs must fit into the plan. His office makes all the spaces work before playing sculptor with the building shape. A better movie would show how his playfulness works well within the constraints of his collage of blocks self-imposed format. And also, how if you take away the curvy buildings, he is not an instant genius, but another brilliant architect of many, making the best of the program he is given.

One mistake the movie makes is to accept the evaluation of the architect of himself without bothering to get at any truth. For instance, the architect compares himself to the great expressionist architect Alvar Aalto. The truth is that Aalto was a functional expressionist in that he invented forms and spaces which served to make his spaces more functional and delightful while Gehry is a sculptural expressionist who makes sculpltural spaces and forms which must incendentally function.

The movie is a major dissapointment in regards to this idea of professional or architects criticism. The director claims he tried to get critics to be a part of the film who were not in love with Gehry’s work but could only find the one. This is ridiculous as architecture is not short of critics and their articles or architects who could provide some insight. The only critic of the work shown is an ivory tower non-architect professor who only says he doesn’t think Gehry’s buildings are so great. That’s it. No digging into any specific discussion of anything. And it’s painfully/comically obvious that Pollack reached for the only tidbit he had been exposed to regarding architecture which was the movie, “The Fountainhead”, and so found a critic that most closely fit the theatrical role of Ellsworth Tooey.

And while a documentary about an artist is not necessarily going to be full of any negative criticism to form what we expect from a biography, we expect a biography to carefully explain the artist and the work using experts and not just some of the artists friends. Having said that, one of the artist friends in this picture does provide the most straightforward description of Gehry’s creative process as he grabs things off a table and starts to play with them.

At one point Mr. Gehry telling says that there is no point of satisfaction from finally getting to realize a building such as Bilbao. And this is a lost opportunity for the film. For what did he expect? Just as Kierkegaard suggested, there is emptiness where there is no higher goal other than fame. (As an atheist myself, and so leaving Kierkegaard behind-) I would like to have heard the director probe the architect’s past experiences for what satisfaction an architect could get which does last? Perhaps it comes from helping people in the community.

This is an architect who asked when helping the local museum with another starchitects project why he couldn’t have the museum job. When his binocular bulding was published in Time magazine, he admitted that he was extremely worried that the artist who created the binoculars would get all the attention (he never made that mistake again- learning to create his own sculptural centerpiece as loud as possible to get attention) Mr. Gehry said he thought he should be the architect chosen for the billion dollar Getty Museum as he was more in tune with the flotsam and Jetsam of LA, not the chosen Richard Meier (see Umberto Ecco’s essay on the old Getty Museum for why this acropolis was even built- a response to architectural criticism if you can believe it). Mr. Gehry demanded to know from a critic why he couldn’t be put on the same plane as the most famous architect Le Corbusier (because Gehry’s talent is one dimensional like Mies in case anyone reading this wants to know). And this movie was a result, no doubt, of Lou Kahn’s biological son stopping in Mr. Gehry’s office to ask about the influence of Lou Kahn for the movie, “My Architect”. Mr. Gehry no doubt immediately asked someone, ‘Why can’t there be a movie about me?’.

A juvenile ego is arts greatest patron. We benefit greatly from this as all of us architects owe Mr. Gehry a great debt for pushing the envelope in the popular architecture arena. Just having the balls to scrunch everything up and make it work deserves a nobel prize. Architects such as Bart Prince, Bruce Goff, etc. have toiled in obscurity, doing idiosyncratic work, but not in the limelight so the profession did not get a chance to become more free. Mr. Gehry gave the profession a big present in this regard and we are eternally grateful. And for Mr. Gehry’s creation of 3-D scanning to 3-D software to shop drawings-as-construction drawings we owe an immense debt of 5 or 10 years fast forwarding. None of this is in the movie.

Can architecture be done with 2 dimensional drawings any longer?

Finally, Gehry says he is a socialist and that’s why he did not pay the $1 fee to see the international architectural masterpiece Taliesan by one of the world’s greatest architects, Frank Lloyd Wright, years ago when he went to visit it. He later created a whole branding approach which involved himself wearing a blue collar shirt and using cheap materials and not aligning forms so there was no hierarchy (except the pyramid of blocks but that’s for keeping circulation space in control). And yet, he is the first to jump on the bandwagon of “starchitects” at the top with other architects below. He said once that there were a ___ number approximately of star architects. He refers to himself as a “gorilla” in architecture. Now, those architects who want to be in this exclusive architectural aristocracy catch on quickly and rush to associate themselves with this club. The way to do this is to include it in your language and marketing. Next thing I know, at a Peter Eisenman lecture some years ago in London, Mr. Eisenman refers to himself as a “Gorilla” (I’m not kidding) and adds that there is another “Gorilla” in the front row where Zaha Hadid was sitting. Thus, to take any architect’s statements regarding themselves and pass them on without studying architectural history, etc. can, sometimes, just propulgate false social hierarchies. A juvenile ego does not allow for a movement of the center from the self.

In this age of glossy marketing and branding where whoever gets their name in the paper gets the best commission, it is too bad that the architect’s friend, the director Sidney Pollack, was so nice to him. We all may have done the same with our friends in his place but the deeper documentary/biography of Frank Gehry still needs to be made. The architect was approached many times for such a movie it seems and instead played safe by picking his friend Mr. Pollack.

Frank Gehry is a great architect, a hero to me and many others for not settling for, “can’t do that”, and deserves to have a real in-depth movie made about him. Let’s hope he let’s go as he tries to do with his buildings and takes a chance by letting someone make that movie.
Rating: 3 / 5